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Summary
Summary
A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. HelenDriscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity. The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction.
Author Notes
Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia on January 30, 1931. Before becoming an author in the early 1960s, she went to work for the British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong, was an employee of the British High Commissioner's Office in Wellington, New Zealand, and was a technical assistant to under-developed countries for the United Nations.
Her first book, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, was published in 1963. Her other books include The Evening of the Holiday, People in Glass Houses, The Bay of Noon, Greene on Capri, Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case, Defeat of an Ideal, and The Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples written with her husband Francis Steegmuller. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1980 for The Transit of Venus and the National Book Award for fiction in 2003 for The Great Fire. She died on December 12, 2016 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A new novel from Hazzard is a literary event. It's been two decades between the publication of The Transit of Venus and this magnificent book, but her burnished prose has not diminished in luster nor has her wisdom about the human condition. Two men who have survived WWII and are now enduring the soiled peace, and one 17-year-old woman who has suffered beyond her years, are the characters around whom this narrative revolves. Aldred Leith, 32, the son of a famous novelist and the winner of a military medal for heroism, has come to postwar Japan to observe the conditions there for a book he's writing on the consequences of war within an ancient society. In an idyllic setting above the city of Kure, near Hiroshima, he meets teenaged Helen Driscoll and her terminally ill brother, Ben, who are the poetic children of a loathsome Australian army major and his harridan wife. Leith is drawn to the siblings, who live vicariously in classic literature, and he soon realizes that he's in love with Helen, despite the difference in their ages. Meanwhile, Leith's close friend Peter Exley, who interrogates Japanese war criminals in Hong Kong, faces a decision about what to do with the rest of his life. He dreams of becoming an art historian, but he lacks the courage to make a clean break from the law. When he suddenly acts rashly, the outcome is dreadfully ironic. The leitmotif here is the need for love to counteract the vile wind of history that breeds loss and dislocation. Hazzard writes gently, tenderly, yet with fierce knowledge of how a dearth of love can render lives meaningless. The purity of her sentences, each one resonant with implication, create an effortless flow. This is a quiet book, but one that carries portents well beyond its time and place, suggesting the disquieting state of our current world. (Oct.) Forecast: A certain generation of readers who know Hazzard's work will buy this book with alacrity. Widespread review coverage should generate additional attention. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
Aldred Leith is the son of a novelist whose well-established literary reputation is matched only by the wintry chill in his heart. But father and son share one secret, one love, which by the end of the book will come to appear redemptive. Aldred is an English officer who has fought bravely in battle, being both wounded and decorated in the process. The year is now 1947 and Aldred is 32 when he arrives in Kure, close to Hiroshima. He is engaged on a book of his own, not fiction but a mighty work of cultural description. His subject is life in the east and the vast convulsions that countries like China and Japan are undergoing after the second world war. He becomes, in his unique and particularised way, a part of these convulsions, for much of the author's theme is taken up with the shifting landmasses of ideological and social change, and the draughty little corridors of probity and affection that can still occasionally be found within them. Down such corridors, through a maze of difficulties both personal and historical, the main characters of The Great Fire move on towards their blessings and disasters. In the hills above Kure, Aldred meets Helen and Benedict Driscoll, the delightful children of some peculiarly unlovely parents. The father is a coarse mandarin, his wife a fussy dominatrix, whose casual assumption of social superiority bespeaks her innate vulgarity. She is a loud and vexatious soul, busily letting the little world all about her know what's what. Her children hate her. Already here we are introduced to one of the author's continuing preoccupations: the war hasn't ended, only the fighting. If there has been a victory in this region, it doesn't appear to be a cultural one. Meanwhile Aldred's old friend Peter Exley is over in Hong Kong, sifting through the human garbage, interrogating Japanese war criminals and assessing the tales of their victims. His ambition is to be an art historian, to transcend the cultural constrictions of his antipodean background. Their biographies run in tandem, though to very different conclusions. Aldred (his name means an elderly sage, which he isn't, thankfully) already has one dead marriage behind him, and a cluster of unresolved affairs, but the youthful Helen Driscoll soon captures his attention entirely, which means that her beloved brother Benedict must also be placed at the centre of his life. Ben is being eaten away by a rare disease, whose appetite to consume him appears unassuageable. He is also brilliant and, by a genealogical quirk he shares with his sister, utterly unlike his benighted mother and father. In fact, not so much unlike as antithetical. His progressive debilitation somehow emblematises the cauldron of radioactive misery that is nearby Hiroshima. The novel moves back and forth: Japan, China, Hong Kong, Britain. The author's view of this international post-war reality is disenchanted to the point of dyspepsia. Squalor, physical and mental, is evoked with a clarity only possible to a writer of fastidious intellectual assurance. A style as complex and lucid as this constitutes a species of moral achievement. (It is true that the conversations between the characters tend to read as though they are written rather than spoken, but then no conversation in a book is ever a transcription of actual speech.) Shirley Hazzard won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for her last novel, The Transit of Venus , published in 1981, and The Great Fire is a finalist in this year's National Book Awards. The praise is deserved. Her finely nuanced observations about human relations often have a subtlety reminiscent of Henry James: "She could not quite suggest, but pervasively implied, that some cheerful young woman would redeem her son's restlessness - not perceiving that the son, whose wanderings were far from wayward, was in some respects overredeemed already." Here the panache of "overredeemed" is precisely counterbalanced by the exactitude of "in some respects". There is nothing here of that melodrama of overstatement that characterises a certain brand of contemporary writing. Aldred and Helen's relationship progresses, as does Benedict's disease, and an unexpected fate awaits Peter Exley when he finally takes his life in his hands, together with someone else's. This author is too intelligent to pretend that romance can reverse the entropic principle to which we are all subjected sooner or later, but the very last words of the book allow for the possibility that love may at least light us as we go, even if it can't prevent our departure. This is a very fine novel indeed. Alan Wall's latest novel is China (Secker & Warburg). To order The Great Fire for pounds 13.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-hazzard15.1 [Aldred Leith] is an English officer who has fought bravely in battle, being both wounded and decorated in the process. The year is now 1947 and Aldred is 32 when he arrives in Kure, close to Hiroshima. He is engaged on a book of his own, not fiction but a mighty work of cultural description. His subject is life in the east and the vast convulsions that countries like China and Japan are undergoing after the second world war. He becomes, in his unique and particularised way, a part of these convulsions, for much of the author's theme is taken up with the shifting landmasses of ideological and social change, and the draughty little corridors of probity and affection that can still occasionally be found within them. Down such corridors, through a maze of difficulties both personal and historical, the main characters of The Great Fire move on towards their blessings and disasters. Aldred (his name means an elderly sage, which he isn't, thankfully) already has one dead marriage behind him, and a cluster of unresolved affairs, but the youthful Helen Driscoll soon captures his attention entirely, which means that her beloved brother [Benedict Driscoll] must also be placed at the centre of his life. Ben is being eaten away by a rare disease, whose appetite to consume him appears unassuageable. He is also brilliant and, by a genealogical quirk he shares with his sister, utterly unlike his benighted mother and father. In fact, not so much unlike as antithetical. His progressive debilitation somehow emblematises the cauldron of radioactive misery that is nearby Hiroshima. - Alan Wall.
Kirkus Review
Hazzard painstakingly constructs a compact panorama of a world ravaged by war, in her expert fourth novel--and first since the NBCC Award winner, The Transit of Venus (1980). The story opens in 1947 when Major Aldred Leith, a 32-year-old combat veteran and prison camp survivor, travels to a military compound on an island in Japan's Inland Sea, preparatory to a "tour" of Hiroshima, one of several sites he's compelled to write about, and understand. Housed with the family of an intemperate Brigadier, Aldred finds himself drawn to the latter's adolescent children: beautiful, reserved Helen, and her almost ethereal brother Benedict, who is wasting away from a pernicious paralytic disease. Hazzard very gradually layers in revealing details of Aldred's family background (as the basically unloved son of a successful romance novelist), complicated sexual and marital history, and increasingly disillusioning military experiences. And, in dexterously handled parallel narratives, she traces the fortunes of other deracinated and stricken people ("Everyone has a cruel story"): notably, Aldred's Australian soldier friend Peter Exley, assigned to Hong Kong to investigate allegations of Japanese war crimes. The irony of "conquest" is expressed with matchless clarity and grace, as military idealism reaps what it has sown, Aldred stoically bears scars inflicted by "the great fire into which his times had pitched him," things fall clamorously apart, and several "heroes" and "rescuers" recognize the bitter truth of the "Chinese maxim whereby one becomes responsible for the life one saves." And all this is communicated in a chiseled prose that makes the pages shimmer, many shaped with the concentrated intensity of poetry. Except for a very slightly improbable ending, this almost indescribably rich story (which will remind many of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient) moves from strength to strength, and no reader will be unmoved by its sorrowing, soaring eloquence. One of the finest novels ever written about war and its aftermath, and well worth the 23-year wait. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Despite this Australian writer's absence from the world's fiction stage--since the 1981 publication of The Transit of Venus, which earned her great acclaim, including the National Book Critics' Circle Award--her readers have continued to hold hands in devotion and anticipation. Their thrill over her new novel will be completed; the long days and nights of waiting will be forgotten. Time and place have always been exactly evoked in Hazzard's fiction, and such is the case here. The time is 1947-48, and the place is, primarily, East Asia. Obviously, then, this is a locale much altered--by the events of World War II, of course, and, as we see, physical destruction and psychological wariness and weariness lay over the land. Our hero, and indeed he fills the requirements to be called one, is Aldred Leith, who is English and part of the occupation forces inapan; his particular military task is damage survey. He has an interesting past, including, most recently, a two-year walk across civil-war-torn China to write a book. In the present, which readers will feel they inhabit right along with Leith, by way of Hazzard's beautifully atmospheric prose, he meets the teenage daughter and younger son of a local Australian commander. And, as Helen is growing headlong into womanhood, this novel of war's aftermath becomes a story of love--or more to the point, of the restoration of the capacity for love once global and personal trauma have been shed. --Brad Hooper Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal Review
More than two decades after winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Transit of Venus, this splendid writer finally hazards another novel. Her "great fire" is World War II. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpt from The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. Copyright (c) 2003 by Shirley Hazzard. To be published in October, 2003 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain. Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way. He would presently see that rain continued to fall on the charred suburbs of Tokyo, raising, even within the train, a spectral odour of cinders. Meanwhile, he was examining a photograph of his father. Aldred Leith was holding a book in his right hand--not reading, but looking at a likeness of his father on the back cover. It was one of those pictures, the author at his desk. In an enactment of momentary interruption, the man was half-turned to the camera, left elbow on blotter, right hand splayed over knee. Features fine and lined, light eyes, one eyelid drooping. A taut mouth. Forehead full, full crop of longish white hair. The torso broad but spare; the clothes unaffected, old and good. As a boy, Leith had wondered how his father could always have good clothes so seldom renewed--a seeming impossibility, like having a perpetual two days' growth of beard. The expression, not calm but contained, was unrevealing. Siding with the man, the furniture supplied few clues: a secretary of dark wood was fitted in its top section with pigeonholes and small closed drawers. This desk had been so much part of the climate of family life, indivisible from his father's moods--and even appearing, to the child, to generate them--that the son had never until now inspected it with adult eyes. For that measure of detachment, a global conflict had been required, a wartime absence, a voyage across the world, a long walk through Asia; a wet morning and strange train. There was no telephone on the desk, no clock or calendar. A bowl of blown roses, implausibly prominent, had perhaps been borrowed, by the photographer, from another room. On the blotter, two handwritten pages were shielded by the tweedy sleeve. Pens and pencils fanned from a holder alongside new books whose titles, just legible, were those of Oliver Leith's novels in postwar translations. There were bills on a spike, a glass dish of chips, a paperweight in onyx. No imaginable colours, other than those of the foisted flowers; no object that invited, by its form or material, the pressure of a hand. No photograph. Nothing to suggest familiarity or attachment. The adult son thought the picture loveless. The father who had famously written about love--love of self, of places, of women and men--was renowned for a private detachment. His life, and that of his wife, his child, was a tale of dislocation: there were novels of love from Manchuria to Madagascar. The book newly to hand, outcome of a grim postwar winter in Greece, could be no exception. And was called Parthenon Freeze. If the man had stood up and walked from the picture, the strong torso would have been seen to dwindle into the stockiness of shortish legs. The son's greater height, not immoderate, came through his mother; his dark eyes also. All this time, Leith's body had been gathering speed. Putting the book aside, he interested himself in the world at the window: wet town giving way to fields, fields soggily surrendering to landscape. The whole truncated from time to time by an abrupt tunnel or the lash of an incoming train. Body went on ahead; thought hung back. The body could give a good account of itself--so many cities, villages, countries; so many encounters, such privation and exertion should, in anyone's eyes, constitute achievement. Leith's father had himself flourished the trick of mobility, fretting himself into receptivity and fresh impression. The son was inclined to recall the platform farewells. He had the shabby little compartment to himself. It was locked, and he had been given a key. It was clean, and the window had been washed. Other sections of the train were crammed with famished, thread bare Japanese. But the victors travelled at their ease, inviolable in their alien uniforms. Ahead and behind, the vanquished overflowed hard benches and soiled corridors: men, women, infants, in the miasma of endurance. In the steam of humanity and the stench from an appalling latrine. Deploring, Aldred Leith was nevertheless grateful for solitude, and spread his belongings on the opposite seat. Having looked awhile at Asia from his window, he brought out a different, heavier book from his canvas bag. In that spring of 1947, Leith was thirty-two years old. He did not consider himself young. Like others of his generation, had perhaps never quite done so, being born into knowledge of the Great War. In the thoughtful child, as in the imaginative and travelled schoolboy, the desire had been for growth: to be up and away. From the university where he did well and made friends, he had strolled forth distinctive. Then came the forced march of resumed war. After that, there was no doubling back to recover one's youth or take up the slack. In the wake of so much death, the necessity to assemble life became both urgent and oppressive. Where traceable, his paternal ancestors had been, while solidly professional, enlivened by oddity. His grandfather, derided by relatives as an impecunious dilettante, had spiked all guns by inventing, at an advanced age, a simple mechanical process that made his fortune. Aldred's father, starting out as a geologist whose youthful surveys in high places--Bhutan, the Caucasus--produced, first, lucid articles, had soon followed these with lucid harsh short stories. The subsequent novels, astringently romantic, brought him autonomy and fame. Renouncing geology, he had kept a finger, even so, on the pulse of that first profession, introducing it with authority here and there in his varied narratives: the Jurassic rocks of East Greenland, the lavatic strata of far islands; these played their parts in the plot. In Oliver Leith's house in Norfolk there hung a painting of the youthful geologist prowling the moraines on his shortish legs. A picture consequential yet inept, like a portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon. Leith's mother, by birth a Londoner, was of Scots descent. There were red-cheeked relatives, well connected. A fine tall stone house, freezing away near Inverness, had been a place of cousinly convergence in summers before the Second World War. Aldred had not been an only child: a younger sister had died in childhood from diphtheria. It was then that his mother had begun to accompany, or follow, her husband on his journeys, taking their son with her. And on the move ever since, the son thought, looking from his window at the stricken coasts of Japan. Two years ago, as war was ending, he had intended to create for himself a fixed point, some centre from which departures might be made--the decision seeming, at the time, entirely his to make. Instead, at an immense distance from anything resembling home, he wondered with unconcern what circumstance would next transform the story. From a habit of self-reliance, he was used to his own moods and did not mind an occasional touch of fatalism. He had, himself, some fame, quite unlike his father's and quite unsought. It was near evening when he arrived. The train was very late, but an Australian soldier sent to meet him was waiting on the improvised platform: "Major Leith?" "You had a long wait." "That's all right." They went down ill-lit wooden stairs. A jeep was parked on gravel. "I had a book." They swung the kit aboard, and climbed in. On an unrepaired road, where pedestrians wheeled bicycles in the dusk, they skirted large craters and dipped prudently into small ones. They were breathing dust and, through it, smells of the sea. Leith asked, "What were you reading?" The soldier groped with free hand to the floor. "My girl sent it." The same photograph: Oliver Leith at his desk. On the front cover, the white tide, cobalt sky, and snowbound Acropolis. Leith brought out his own copy from a trenchcoat pocket. "I'll be damned." They laughed, coming alive out of khaki drab. The driver was possibly twenty: staunch body, plain pleasant face. Grey eyes, wide apart, wide awake. "You related?" "My father." "I'm damned." They were near the waterfront now, following the bed of some derelict subsidiary railway. The joltings might have smashed a rib cage. You could just see an arc of coastal shapes, far out from ruined docks: hills with rare lights and a black calligraphy of trees fringing the silhouettes of steep islands. The foreground reality, a wartime shambles of a harbour with its capsized shipping, was visible enough, and could, in that year, have been almost anywhere on earth. The driver was peering along the track. "Write yourself?" "Not in that way." "Never too late." The boy plainly considered his passenger past the stage of revelations. A dozen years apart in age, they were conclusively divided by war. The young soldier, called to arms as guns fell silent, was at peace with this superior--civil and comradely, scarcely saluting or saying Sir, formalities no longer justified. Intuitively, too, they shared the unease of conquerors: the unseemliness of finding themselves few miles from Hiroshima. "How do you manage here?" The man had a deep, low voice. If one had to put a colour to it, it would have been dark blue; or what people in costly shops call burgundy. Excerpted from The Great Fire: A Novel by Shirley Hazzard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
"The Great Fire is a brilliant, brave, and sublimely written novel that allows the literate reader 'the consolation of having touched infinity.' |
This wonderful book, which must be read at least twice simply to savor Hazzard's sentences and set pieces, is among the most transcendent works I've ever had the pleasure of reading."--Anita Shreve |
"Shirley Hazzard is, purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today |
Which makes me more than grateful to have this long-hoped-for new novel." |